"This Is Your Life, Donald Duck"

Well, so most people are at least aware of "From Egg to Duck," but how many people have THIS little number, from 1960, on their radar?

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Translations on the Side

As you will see if you take a look to your right, I've added a new page under "links," on which I have collected all my translations in one place for convenient access.  That is all.

"From Egg to Duck" Re-ducks

So when I wrote about this well-known Marco Rota story, I wrote, among many other things:

I briefly considered editing the English dialogue into the panels, until I remembered that I suck at editing images and it would have taken fucking forever.

Hmm.  Well, that was three years ago, I still had my scans, and I sorta thought, notwithstanding its sizable flaws, this is a historically important story, and it ought to be in English.  It was a quick project, so you can download the results right here.  In that previous entry, I made a script available; I used a lot of that for the translation, with a number of awkward bits smoothed out or edited down for space ('cause I really didn't have much of a notion of what would fit in a single panel).

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"The Legend of Donald of the Woods"

Okay, at long last, here we go.  I don't know WHY it felt like this took so damn long, but here we are.  Now, this story has long been one of my favorite Scarpa ventures, particularly in the duck realm.  I wanted to translate it for a long time, but I kept holding off, on the theory that it's the kind of thing that would be absolutely perfect for official localization, were a new publisher to emerge.  Certainly more so than anything else I've worked on.  But…I don't see that new publisher exactly looming on the horizon, do you?  Besides, I liked it enough that I wanted to put words in the characters' mouths, dammit.  Anyway, you can download my translation right here.

(If there's one single, small moment in my script that you find seriously WTF?, it's probably because you're not getting my super-geeky China Miéville reference.  Don't worry about it.)

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"Back to School"

So I was reading some old Western comics, as one does, and I came upon this Strobl-drawn 1960 story written by the well-regarded ?.  And I thought, huh. This seems...better than your average non-Barks Western- produced duck story. Good show. And then, I looked again and realized that there's a very good reason for that feeling. But, we're getting ahead of ourselves.

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Two cool images found in Picsou Magazine

First, a rather cool self-portrait of Giovan Battista Carpi with ducks and mice--and, perhaps of more interest to fans, a photograph of Carpi with Carl Barks hisself:

...so was Carpi unusually short, or was Barks unusually tall?  My knowledge regarding the relative heights of Disney artists is tragically limited.

Second, the bizarre image that Luciano Bottaro produced in response to the question that famously prompted Don Rosa to draw the ducks at Scrooge's grave:

Right, then!  As you were.

"The Seven Dwarfs and the Witch Queen"

Genuinely Odd Fact Number the First: Snow White/Seven Dwarfs comics were a quite prevalent thing in Italy back in the day.  In absolute terms, there weren't that many (certainly nothing compared to the duck/mouse stuff), but they kept making them, and pretty much all the big names in classic Italian Disney comics--Pedrocchi, Scarpa, Carpi, Bottaro, De Vita père, and of course Martina, along with sundry also-rans--tried their hands at the form at one time or another.  The same cannot be said for the characters from any other Disney movie.  One can only surmise that something about the nature of the movie combined with the time it was released just caused it to strike a particular chord with Italians.  Sure, there's a comparable number of US stories, but let's face it, without having actually read any of them, it's not hard to predict that they're gonna be of minimal interest.  Whereas the Italian stories--well, they could be terrible (none of the above-mentioned had perfect batting averages, certainly), but they're also generally longer, presumably more ambitious, and have top talent behind them.  Someone really cared about this stuff.  I've ordered a few that were published in France.  We'll see what's what.

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